Life's a never-ending chase for the people behind ThePirateBay, the world's largest file-sharing site that's in deep with the authorities, for abetting copyright infringement. The site lost its ".com" TLD domain name, in early-2012, after which it switched to a Swedish ".se" TLD domain name, and operated under the political protection of the Swedish Pirate Party, which has representation in the European Parliament. Convicted in Sweden, and under pressure from the authorities, ThePirateBay set sail for the Caribbean, and registered itself a ".sx" TLD domain name, from the island nation of Sint Maarten.

Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad filed a motion with the courts that seeks seizure of the site's Swedish and recently bought Icelandic domains, pushing the site away from the old continent. Sweden may eventually succeed in wiping off the ".se" domain, but has only transferred the problem to another nation.

A part of what makes ThePirateBay "the most resilient file-sharing site in the galaxy" (in their words), is just how small the site really is. It may abet transaction of tens of terabytes of data each day, but the data itself isn't held by the site, only information on how to get it. A recent switch from holding ".torrent" files for each of its entries, to a site with only Magnet links, made the site infinitesimally smaller. The entire site could fit into a ZIP archive a few hundred megabytes in size, and can slip into everything from a flash drive to a memory card. Since this archive is in distribution, any of the millions of PirateBay users could have full copies of the site, and can resurrect it, even in the absence of its founders.

Interestingly, the move to Sint Maarten doesn't insulate ThePirateBay from EU regulation. While it enjoys several administrative freedoms, sovereignty of the island nation of less than 100,000 residents, is in the hands of France and The Netherlands, both EU member-states. Sint Maarten is located some 166 nautical miles east of Puerto Rico, America's backyard.